In the Blink of an Eye: MERRY CHRISTMAS!

We are finally starting to settle down around here. We have once again visited everyone for the holidays, ate way too much good food and have way too many gifts laying around just begging to be put away. That's not gonna happen today. I don't think one more day will hurt anyone. That's the good thing about having too much room in your house. You can just move to a different room. HA.

I have about 220 new pictures. How do you spell O V E R L O A D? I have a few I left out previously, too. I'm going to attempt to catch up now.

We got a new family member. I came home from work one day and found him on the kitchen counter. How lovely!

Everyone, meet Rascal the guinea pig. He is super sweet, but the dogs want to eat him so he has to live upstairs. The dogs aren't allowed upstairs. Since he lives up there, I don't get to see him very often. Santa brought him a big ball to roll around in on the floor. I don't know if that is more torturous for Rascal or the dogs. Ethel is our mouser. She just can't stand it that we choose to have a rodent living in the house.
Oh well. She's been finding all sorts of creative ways to get upstairs. I like to call her the BAD dog. She has also had a thing for my Christmas ribbon. She eats it or takes it out into the back yard. We've had a couple of knock down drag outs over that the past couple of weeks. This morning, she had a grown up bird in the den that she had obviously had all over the house during the night. When I got up this morning, there were bird feathers everywhere. They were all the way down the hallway. When I got to the den, there was a naked bird laying on the rug in the middle of the room. Thanks Ethel.

Switching subjects....Both of my babies ran in the St. Jude 5K this year. They have unofficially run the past two years as well, but this year, they ran all by themselves and had their own numbers. I was so proud of them and so glad that they WANTED to do this and understand WHY they are doing it and who and how it helps. Those are the kinds of things that warm a mothers heart.

It was SO cold that day! The kids never complained.

The first thing they did after the race was ask for tissue.
They took us back to this sign afterwards. They liked it. THANK YOU JAKE'S FAMILY.

We recruited our friend, Rohn, to run this year, too. He ran the Half Marathon in great time without even training.

Thank you Rohn.

Christmas was a lot of fun this year. The kids are completely out of control. They are absolutely rotten to the core. Dalton got drums. They are loud!! Savannah's "stuff" wasn't so loud, but she is. The nuts got up at 3:30 Christmas morning and couldn't understand why we didn't want to get up then. I was not to thrilled considering I didn't get to bed until about 1.